Tracey Emin

A prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Emin works in a wide range of mediums, including film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, installation, and sculpture. Her work is intensely personal, revealing intimate details of her life with brutal honesty and poetic humor. She has spoken of “the narcissism behind what I do—the self, self, self—and how difficult it is for me to really share things, even though I think I am sharing all the time.” This paradoxical approach—at once audacious and confessional, narcissistic and self-deprecatory—earned Emin a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1999. Though she did not win, Emin received significant acclaim for her installation titled My Bed, which featured the artist’s unmade bed surrounded by personal items (from slippers to empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and condoms), exploring the allegorical qualities of a bed as a place of birth, sex, and death.

British, b. 1963, Croydon, United Kingdom, based in London, United Kingdom